4-Week: Looking For A Good Time—Creative Spark 4-Pack

Are you looking for a good time? This four-week class aims to spark creative writing ideas and practices, as we play with notebooks, artifacts, and language. We'll learn how keeping a vibrant writer's notebook can provide us with material to use whether we're trying to craft a compelling personal essay, fill a novel with vivid characters and settings, or capture the perfect image for a poem. We'll learn how the oldest story forms, folk and fairy tales, offer potent templates for structuring new work. We’ll delve into scrapbook stories that incorporate journal entries, letters, and documents to illuminate an aspect that straightforward narration alone can’t touch. Finally, we’ll study literary swagger, when the voice of the prose rises to meet the pitch of the story in important moments. We’ll read short excerpts from such writers as Justin Torres, Tess Gunty, Jesmyn Ward, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Miranda July, Damon Young, Kirstin Valdez Quade, Kevin Wilson, Hanif Abdurraquib and more as we seek inspiration and most of all, fun.